However, there was always the possibility that by some unforeseeable ill fortune he might be unmasked, captured, and imprisoned in a tiny cell. A panicking thought.
But even more unnerving was the basic problem of time. Did it move faster for the rats, or slower. He had the impression that life and all its processes moved at a quicker tempo down here. But was that true? Did he now clearly hear the rat-Lankhmarese, which had previously sounded like squeaks, because his ears were quicker, or merely smaller, or because most of a rat’s voice was pitched too high for human ears to hear, or even because rats spoke Lankhmarese only in their burrows? He surreptitiously felt his pulse. It seemed the same as always. But mightn’t it be greatly speeded up and his senses and mind speeded up equally, so that he noted no difference? Sheelba had said something about a day being a tenth of a million pulsebeats. Was that rat or human-pulse? Were rat-hours so short that nine of them might pass in a hundred or so human minutes? Almost he was tempted to rush up the first stairs he saw. No, wait … if the timing was by pulse and his pulse seemed normal, then wouldn’t he have one normal Mouser-sleep to work in town here? It was truly most confusing. “Out upon it all, by cat-gut sausages and roasted dog’s eyes!” he heard himself curse with sincerity.
Several things at any rate were clear. Before he dared idle or nap, let alone sleep, he must discover some way of measuring down here the passage of time in the above-ground world. Also, to get at the truth about rat-night and day, he must swiftly learn about rodent sleeping habits. For some reason his mind jumped back to the tall ratess with the brace of straining shrews. But that was ridiculous, he told himself. There was sleeping and sleeping, and that one had very little if anything to do with the other.
He came out of his thought-trance to realize fully what his senses had for some time been telling him: that the strollers had become fewer, the breeze more damp and cool and fresh, and sea-odorous too, and the pillars ahead natural rock, while through the doorways chiseled between them shone a yellowish light, not bright yet twinkling and quite unlike that of the fire-beetles, glow-wasps, and tiny torches.
He passed a marble doorway and noted white marble steps going down from it. Then he stepped between two of the rocky pillars and halted on the rim of a wonder-place.
It was a roughly circular natural rock cave many rats high and many more long and wide, and filled with faintly rippling seawater which transmitted a mild flood of yellowish light that came through a great wide hole, underwater by about the length of a rat’s-pike, in the other end of the glitter-ceilinged cavern. All around this sea lake, about two rat-pikes above the water, went the rather narrow rock road, looking in part natural, in part chiseled and pickaxed, on which he now stood. At its distant end, in the shadows above the great underwater hole, he could dimly make out the forms and gleaming weapons of a half-dozen or so motionless rats, evidently on guard duty.
As the Mouser watched, the yellow light became yellower still, and he realized it must be the light of later afternoon, surely the afternoon of the day in which he had entered the rat-world. Since sunset was at six o’clock and he had entered the rat-world after three, he had spent fewer than three of his nine hours. Most important he had linked the passage of time in the rat-world with that in the big world—and was somewhat startled at the relief he felt.
He recalled too the “dead” rats which had seemed to swim away from the cage dropped from the palace window into the Inner Sea after Hisvin’s demonstration of his death-spell. They might very well have swum underwater into this very cavern, or another like it.
It also came to him that he had discovered the secret of the damp breeze. He knew the tide was rising now, an hour or so short of full, and in rising it drove the cave-trapped air through the concourse. At low tide the great hole would be in part above water, allowing the cavern air to be refreshed from outside. A rather clever if intermittent ventilation system. Perhaps some of these rats were a bit more ingenious than he had given them credit for.
At that instant there came a light, inhuman touch on his right shoulder. Turning around, he saw stepping back from him with naked rapier held a little to one side the black-masked black-clad rat who had disturbed him in the privy.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he chitteringly blustered. “By God’s hairless tail, why am I catted and ferreted?—you black dog!”
In far less ratlike Lankhmarese than the Mouser’s, the other asked quietly, “What are you doing in a restricted area? I must ask you to unmask, sir.”
“Unmask? I’ll see the color of your liver first, mouseling!” the Mouser ranted wildly. It would never do, he knew, to change character now.
“Must I call in my underlings to unmask you by force?” the other inquired in the same soft, deadly voice. “But it is not necessary. Your reluctance to unmask is final confirmation of my deduction that you are indeed the magically shrunken human come as a spy into Lankhmar Below.”
“That opium specter again?” the Mouser raved, dropping his hand to Scalpel’s hilt. “Begone, mad mouse dipped in ink, before I cut you to collops!”
“Your threats and brags are alike useless, sir,” the other answered with a low and humorous laugh. “You wonder how I became certain of your identity? I suppose you think you were very clever. Actually you gave yourself away more than once. First, by relieving yourself in that jakes where I first encountered you. Your dung was of a different shape, color, consistency, and odor than that of my compatriots. You should have sought out a water-privy. Second, although you did try to shadow your eyes, the eye-holes in your mask are too squintingly close together, as are all human eyes. Third, your boots are clearly made to fit human rather than rodent feet, though you have the small sense to walk on your toes to ape our legs and gait.”
The Mouser noted that the other’s black boots had far tinier soles than his own and were of soft leather both below and above the big ankle-bend.
The other continued, “And from the very first I knew you must be an utter stranger, else you would never have dared shoulder aside and insult the many times proven greatest duelist and fastest sword in all Lankhmar Below.”
With black-gloved left paw the other whipped off his silver-trimmed mask, revealing upstanding oval ears and long furry black face and huge, protuberant, wide-spaced black eyes. Baring his great white incisors in a lordly smirk and bringing his mask across his chest in a curt, sardonic bow, he finished, “Svivomilo, at your service.”
At least now the Mouser understood the vast vanity—great almost as his own!—which had led his pursuer to leave his underlings behind in the concourse while he came on alone to make the arrest. Whipping out simultaneously Scalpel and Cat’s Claw, purposely not pausing to unmask, the Mouser made his most rapid advance, ending in a tremendous lunge at the neck. It seemed to him that he had never before in his life moved as swiftly—small size certainly had its points.
There was a flash and a clash and Scalpel was deflected—by Svivomilo’s dagger drawn with lightning speed. And then Svivomilo’s rapier was on the offensive and the Mouser barely avoiding it by rapid parries with both his weapons and by backing off perilously along the water’s brink. Now his involuntary thought was that his opponent had had a much longer time than he of being small and practicing the swiftness it allowed, while his mask interfered with his vision and if it slipped a little would blind him altogether. Yet Svivomilo’s incessant attacks gave him no time to whip it off. With sudden desperation he lunged forward himself, managing to get a bind with Scalpel on the rapier that momentarily took both weapons out of the fight, and an instant later lashed out with Cat’s Claw at Svivomilo’s dagger-stabbing wrist, and by accurate eye and good fortune cut its inner tendons.
Then as Svivomilo hesitated and sprang back, the Mouser disengaged Scalpel and launched it in another sinew-straining, long lunge, thrice dipping his point just under Svivomilo’s double and then circle parries, and finally drove its point on in a slicing thrust that went through the rat’s neck and ended grating against the vertebra there.
Scarlet blood pouring over the black lace at Svivomilo’s throat and down his chest, and with only one short, bubbling, suffocated gasp, for the Mouser’s thrust had severed wind-pipe as well as arteries, the rightly boastful but foolishly reckless duelist pitched forward on his face and lay writhing.